Feature Requests

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When an owner clicks on a booking in the calendar within the Owner Portal, the financial figures displayed are driven by the fixed financial permission level (Owner Revenue / All Totals / Detailed Financials) set by the property manager.

We have this set to Owner Revenue because if we set it to All Totals then it displays a higher figure as it includes some of the hidden fees/charges that are not relevant to the owner and are paid directly to the PM.  However choosing Owner Revenue doesn't detail the cleaning fee or channel fees so the figures look much lower.

 

There should be a way to display the same figures as is displayed on the statement with the ability to hide any hidden categories.

Hi Katie,

The difficulty I see with this request relying on votes is that there are likely to be a relatively small number of users of the single property template. Of those users there is an even smaller number who are aware that they do not have access to a feature that the multi-property template users do.

What I'd like to understand is why the feature wasn't initially applied to both single and multi-property templates? 

I understand how the new feature request system works but this is not a request for a new feature. Single property hosted website users should not have to fight to get a feature applied to their hosted websites that is already available to multi-property template users.

I know nothing about coding but I assume that now that the code has been written for the multi-property templates, there is less work to apply it to the single property template than there was when it was a completely new feature. 

I'd like to request that, given the circumstances explained above, this feature be added to the single property template without needing to meet the usual requirements for new feature requests.

 

Lucy

I just hear that you’re integrating with Google Hotels!  If you also integrated with Expedia, you could literally corner the boutique hotel and inn space as a PMS.  I researched nearly 20 hotel PMS’ and all but 3 were deeply antiquated and anything interesting basically does a minimum of 20-35 doors as a baseline cost.  

OwnerRez could take the boutique hotel over if it added Google Hotels, Expedia, and maybe one hotel engine channel connector like SoteMinder to connect the vast array of hotel tools. 

Let’s get OwnerRez to bring in all of the inns, Bnb’s, and boutique hotels by making these few additional connections!

Does this mean that you may consider Expedia too?

Unfortunately, we have no estimates or additional information to provide for Expedia at this time. We have the world's best partnership with Vrbo, of course, and some of their STR traffic is co-hosted on Expedia, but I know that's not what you need and won't help the boutique hotel/BnB market at all.  It looks like the Expedia request doesn't have a lot of traffic or votes. Make sure to be noisy over there too!  There may be administrative/partnership obstacles on that one, though.

I also second that remark about you being able to gobble up the entire boutique hotel / inn market with a few upgrades in this direction.  I looked at 18 hotel PMS’ and had plans to move our inns/hotels to them but the market is either deeply antiquated or more modern and robust while pricing out any hotels with less than 25 rooms.  There were literally 3 hotel PMS’ that I felt would meet our standards.  

OwnerRez could absolutely blow the top off of this market if they take the time to integrate with Google Hotels, Expedia, and a channel manager like SiteMinder.  OwnerRez’ engine connected to those sites would change the game for that industry.  Or should I say…. INNdustry

This! Yes! Makes me so happy! I can stop interviewing other systems! Thank you!

Shelley @ The Victorian Inn 

This is fantastic news Paul!  Does this mean that you may consider Expedia too?

We had to move to another PMS for a historic boutique hotel that we bought last year (and are still trying to run our other, smaller, inns on OwnerRez).  This might allow us to move all of our hotel properties to OwnerRez if you add Google Hotels and Expedia.  The last thing would be the ability to connect with a 3rd party channel manager that allows connections to things like Google Meta and 3rd party hotel software like Stash Rewards, etc.  

All I was meaning to say was Woohoo!  Very excited.  Let me know if you want a tester.  

Also, while it's 5% of your base now that would be eligible, I bet if you had this feature you would have a lot more customers like us. I only went with OwnerRez because renting the full Inn rental used to be a bigger chunk of our business but I wouldn't have considered it if that weren't the case

Very true!

if we disable all of our room types but one will most of the work we've done stay in place since our account is still open?

Yes, that will work. There would probably be some minimal cleaning up when you come back because the listing content might be a bit stale, but yes that will work!

Thanks for the update Paul! Hopefully this is already accounted for when weighing the prioritization of a feature request/integration but even if it's 5% of your customer base, most feature requests aren't ones that people would leave OwnerRez over for lacking but this one has a huge financial impact. Also, while it's 5% of your base now that would be eligible, I bet if you had this feature you would have a lot more customers like us. I only went with OwnerRez because renting the full Inn rental used to be a bigger chunk of our business but I wouldn't have considered it if that weren't the case (and it's not the case now but at this point I'm so tied into OwnerRez). I'm in a local Inn group and while they've all heard good things about OwnerRez they also said Google Hotels is a huge income generator and wouldn't consider OwnerRez due to that. So hopefully that is considered and gives the project more momentum but I'm glad to hear it's been greenlit!

If you come across any ways for us to still be able to use Google Hotels in the interim I'm all ears but the only way I understand how basically involves getting a whole new PMS/leaving OwnerRez. I know Bri posted in a comment earlier about leaving an account open waiting for the feature so as not to do the setup work again if we hope to come back, if we disable all of our room types but one will most of the work we've done stay in place since our account is still open?

Thanks again!

Lindy

Adding on to what Bri said...

We have "done research" on Google Hotels twice in the past, once a long time ago and then again right after we released GVR. There are many types of research - product market fit, partnership requirements, etc.  The kind of research we're doing now is much deeper and entirely within the engineering team.  The engineering team is actively spec'ing how it deviates from GVR and writing coding tasks.  In the past week, we have greenlit it, and it's been assigned to an engineer to move forward.  As for when it will be released or what obstacles we hit from this point forward, we can't say, which is why Bri said we can't give an ETA.

Re: why hasn't this been done sooner, we agree that there is a real need for Google Hotels within the STR world (because of small boutique-style BnBs, inns, and motels that are caught between a rock and a hard place), but we estimate that only about 5% of our customer base will actually be able to use it. That 5% isn't even everyone who would use it, necessarily, just the group of users who would be eligible.  Compare that to Marriott, which has a 20-30%+ eligibility fit.

Unless something completely unforeseen happens, this should be out long before October.  Not guaranteeing that, just saying that based on the R&D and engineering tasks I see at the moment, it should not take that long.

I will likely be leaving in October if Google hotels isn’t released by then. Question: can my account stay inactive so when you do get it I can come back? 

You cannot have an OwnerRez account that does not incur monthly fees. However, should you choose to do so, you can close your account if / when needed. We can re-open the account if you decide to come back at a later date. Keep in mind though that there is manual work that will need to be done by you upon reopening.

When an OwnerRez account is closed, many things are turned off including, but not limited to:

- Channel Integration connections
- Calendar import/exports
- Scheduled credit card payments
- Messaging automation (eg. triggers)
- Hosted websites, SSL certificates
- Widget integration

We have to make sure that all of these things, and other background processes, are no longer running, so a number of things are checked and flagged when an account is closed. The closing process is invasive on an account and therefore not magically reversed.

Because of this, it may be financially worthwhile to keep your account open instead of closing and reactivating the account later, if that is what you're planning on doing.

Hi Bri, why only on the radar and in the research phase after over two years?

Hey Scott,

As I mentioned above, Google Hotels has some meaningful technical differences from Vacation Rentals that require us to fully understand the scope before development can begin. On top of that, we have to weigh it against the overall demand we're seeing across all feature requests, and right now there are items with higher overall demand from our user base.

We're invested in making this happen and will post updates here as they're available.

I will likely be leaving in October if Google hotels isn’t released by then. Question: can my account stay inactive so when you do get it I can come back? 

Hi Bri, why only on the radar and in the research phase after over two years?

Hi Bri, checking back in to see if there are any updates on this. I'm considering moving to another PMS and this is the primary reason but that will take time and effort so if this is something OwnerRez really has on their radar I would wait. 
Thanks,
Lindy

Hey, Lindy!

Our devs are in the research phase for Google Hotels integration at this time. While many things are similar between Hotels and Vacation Rentals, there are some significant differences with the Hotels aspect that we have to understand fully before we can start developing this integration.

It is absolutely on our radar, and I can see some recent back and forth internally on the research side. How long it could take to get from the research phase into development, and then into production, I simply cannot say.

I do not intend to make any false promises here. We are very interested in a Google Hotels integration, but there's still a good bit of work to be done to get there. That said, there's no ETA I can provide.

We will post updates in this thread as they become available. 

There are OwnerRez users that have B & B’s and boutique hotels that have front desks and are in need of hotel.com 

Hi Bri, checking back in to see if there are any updates on this. I'm considering moving to another PMS and this is the primary reason but that will take time and effort so if this is something OwnerRez really has on their radar I would wait. 
Thanks,
Lindy

Hey Eric,

Your request was merged with another that asks for this setting for direct booking sites as well, but I did want to let you know this is a setting on your Airbnb API.

It's not a per property setting at this time and would apply to all properties that are live on that specific connection, but you'll find it in Settings > Channel Integrations > Airbnb > click Change > Lead Time.

 

Our development team would like to formally request the addition of Retry-After and X-RateLimit-Remaining  headers to the OwnerRez API responses. Adding these headers would provide essential data for our client-side traffic management.
Justification for the Headers:

• Improved Rate-Limit Management: We are actively implementing an outbound rate-limit governor on our HTTP client to ensure our traffic stays below the cap with necessary headroom.
• Clean Recovery from Errors: Currently, when a 429 "Too Many Requests" error is received, the client has to rely on guesswork for retry timing. Providing the Retry-After header would allow us to implement "better retry/backoff on the queue side" so that any 429 errors we see "recovers cleanly".
• Fine-Tuning: The X-RateLimit-Remaining header would allow us to fine-tune our client-side governor, giving us real-time insight into the available capacity before we hit the limit.

Implementing these standard rate-limiting headers would significantly improve the robustness and efficiency of our HomeRunner integration, leading to a better experience for the OwnerRez customers we both support.

We appreciate you taking the time to submit this feature request! If you know other users who would benefit from this, we'd encourage you to share it with them so they can add their support by way of an upvote at the top of the page.

HI Sheila!

Since you're API connected to Vrbo, OwnerRez is in full control of the booking. So if you need to add additional charges based on the length of stay, such as for extra cleaning, you can add them to the charges in OwnerRez and then send the guest a request to the guest to pay for the additional charges. We have this support article that goes over changing charges: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/changing-the-charges-for-a-quote#booking-charges

When it comes to other OTAs, it's hard to control the amount that's required at the time of booking. For Vrbo, it should respect the amount that's due at the time of booking that's been set in OwnerRez. But sites that are the merchant of record, like Airbnb, have their own settings, so you wouldn't be able to control what's due up front. You could set channels like Airbnb and Vrbo to request to book, but it still won't allow you to change how much is due up front. Airbnb would still be in control of how much is due, and you can't send quotes to Vrbo guests; they have to book on their site.

I use August locks (owned by YALE) and would also like to see Yale/August integration with OwnerRez. 

I've been using Yale locks since 2019 originally through Rently.  Now I'm doing it myself and running them all on the Yale App, 28 of them and it works great.  It Also integrates with airbnb automatically so that saves me some time.  I'm entering all the reservations from VRBO or my own website myself, which takes some keeping up with. I have OwnerRez set to generate the codes. Would love to see this integration in the future.

Hi Abby!

If you want to mark all messages in the inbox as read, you should be able to do so by going to the inbox and clicking the check box on the left-hand side at the very top of the message threads (right under the compose box). Once that's checked, all threads should be checked, and you'll see an open envelope that you can click and mark them all as read: 

[This topic has been merged with another topic (Request for Separate Booking Window Lead-Time for Instant Bookings vs. Inquiries). All unique votes have also been merged.]

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (Keep days within required lead time available, just not for instant booking)]

We've received your feature request—thank you! If you think others would love this too, spread the word and invite them to upvote. Community feedback really helps us prioritize what to build next.

My contact info is info@galvestonrents.com. I would appreciate a dialog if you would regarding this.

Paul

I'm honestly surprised I can't find this feature being requested before...

I'd like a trigger that looks at any field OR custom field and allows us to write a rule:

• field = is known
• field = is not known

The real world example for me is lock codes. I use a 3rd party lock software that populate a custom field once the code is set. Sometimes the code can take 20+ minutes to set. I currently have no method of setting a trigger to ONLY send a message once the actual code is set on the lock. I would like to set a trigger that says "If lock code = is known" then send message.

Known/is_known trigger could be used to customize so many things.

I'm looking for something similar. We reduce our management fee if people pay by check. Currently we are using the following workaround (explained by Ask Rezzy):

 

Discounts in OwnerRez are calculated as a percentage of rent or a fixed amount - they don't target a specific line item like a management fee. There's no built-in way to apply a discount only to the management fee while leaving rent untouched.

What you can do is create a negative surcharge (a surcharge with a negative dollar amount) in the Management Fee category. That would show up as a separate line item discount on the booking charges, distinct from rent. You'd configure it under Settings > Pricing > Surcharges > + Create Surcharge, pick the Management Fee category, and enter a negative fixed amount.

 

This negative surcharge reeks havok on our line item pivot because it still looks like a "discount" and technically it is a reduced management fee and the rent is not discounted. We would love the ability to set up a custom discount but have it apply to expenses rather than rent!